The Samsung S6 and the HTC One M9

It was an exciting week for Android fans as two of the big manufacturers announced new additions to their flagship lines.

HTC announced the “early spring” launch of the update to the One M8, the One M9 (seems logical). The M9 will keep the all-metal design but promises easier to grip sides of the phone, which was my primary complaint of the M8. It has a large, 2840 mHa battery, 20-megapixel rear camera, beautiful 1080 Full HD display and 32GB of memory. To supplement the memory is an expandable memory slot, something found on fewer and fewer phones today. It kept one of my favorite features from the M8, front facing speakers. It makes the phone tall, but the sound is much better than the rear or bottom mounted speakers on virtually all other smartphones.

Not to be outdone, Samsung announced TWO new phones. Well, two designs of the same phone, really. The also numerically numbers S6 and S6 Edge are the latest upgrades to the Samsung Galaxy “S” lineup. But this time instead of just taking the previous version and slapping a few new things inside, Samsung rebuilt this from the ground up. It has a 5.1 inch screen, a decent 2550mAH batter, 16MP rear camera and 3GB of memory. One things that’s oddly absent from this Samsung phone is expandable memory, but as I mentioned before this is a feature that is rapidly disappearing from the smartphone landscape. The S6 Edge is essentially teh same phone with two curved edge notification screens. I’m curious to see how much functionality is gained by this feature.

Unlike HTC, Samsung gave a release date for the S6 line of April 10th.

I’ve owned previous versions of both of these phones and I am excited to see these upgrades. The new processors, amazing screens and new case mods all keep both the HTC One M9 and the Samsung Galaxy S6 lines at the top of both the Android and the general smartphone heap. Also, all of these will be running Android 5.0, Lollipop.

It’s expected that these devices will be available to all carriers, so get ready!